Background

For the relief effort in Haiti it is important to know which hospitals are located where and what their condition is after the earthquake. Immediatelly after the earthquake, the Sahana foundation has prepared a database with hospitals located in Haiti. In a community effort it has been populated with ~ 150 entries.

On the other hand, mappers have been adding hospitals to the OSM database. They traced over satellite imagery and added data from MINUSTAH and from other sources in the public domain.

In the meantime, the Pan Americal Health Orgaization (PAHO/WHO) provides a master list of medical facilities (hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, etc.). Work is currently underway to import this reference dataset into the OSM database.

Data sets

Hospitals identified by WHO/PAHO

There is huge list of medical facilities (hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, etc.) collected by Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO), see announcement on talk-ht. It has more than 1000 geo located entries. There is a second major advantage: PAHO has assigned a unique hospital id which can be used to refer to the facilities from the OSM database.

Data originally from MSPP

The PAHO medical facility list seems to have included the Ministry of Health's (MSPP) "2005 MSPP database with geocodes" as can be seen e.g. here. What was the process of the MSPP database converting/merging into the PAHO database is not clear from the tags / change set information. (Perhaps someone with better information could clarify this?)

Has the data e.g. been tweaked, merged with another data set, vetting in a way or an other, or something else?

Data from Sahana

An initial import of the hospitals to OSM has been done. The Sahana data set is not maintained any more, though, and it isn't updated in the OSM database. During the first import of the PAHO/WHO list care has been taken to match already mapped health facilities from the Sahana data set with the new health facilities from the PAHO/WHO list. The former Sahana data set can be downloaded in various formats from the Sahana website.

CDC/USAID MCH facilities list

"MCH" is an acronym for "Maternal and Child Healthcare". A report was prepared in or after 2003 entitled "PMTCT Baseline Assessment and Planning Template", a product of the CDC and USAID; "PMTCT" refers to "Preventing Maternal To Child Transmission [of HIV]". This report states in Part 10 ("Line list of MCH facilities in country"; pg 19): "No list of health facilities providing MCH services is available." The report provides such a list for the first time. As this is apparently a product of the United States government, we may be free to use it without further inquiry; an e-mail address and author appear in the document properties to which an inquiry might be made if deemed necessary.

Ground surveyed data

As of October 2011 there has been significant ground surveying and addition to the OSM database at least by the local mapper group, COSMHA as part of their work with IOM. This data has a focus on the cholera response related health facilities. (Is this better documented somewhere in the wiki??)

Data in OSM

Traditionally, a hospital in OSM is a node or way tagged with amenity=hospital.

Roles of the data sets - comparison

Data set

Role

PAHO/WHO

The PAHO/WHO is the reference dataset for health facilities in Haiti. It provides the semantic unique id for health facilities. Note that this data set includes (at least) the "2005 MSPP database with geocodes".

OSM database

The OSM database shall include a replica for the health facilities in Haiti in order to (1) display it on the OSM maps and to (2) make it available in OSM queries.

Sahana

As of 2010-02-03 the Sahana database became a less important source for health facilities. The OSM database still links to Sahana entries using the tag sahana_id=* (and sometimes ref:sahana_id=*)but the remaining semantic attributes should be replicas of the PAHO/WHO list.

CDC/USAID MCH List

Produced in or after 2003, provides a list of facilities at which maternal and child healthcare services can be found.

Unique identifier of departement the facility is located in. This is an ID manged by PAHO/WHO. It doesn't correspond with the OSM object ID of a corresponding departement boundary.

Don't edit after first import. Will be updated by scripts, if necessary. Do not set to an OSM object id of the respective village/city. Don't add an is_in:departement=* tag, nominatim should geocode the facility correctly because it knows the departement boundaries in Haiti

Use amenity=hospital for the Haiti health facilities in general, in a ad-hoc fashion, so that they show, with a red cross and at zoom levels allowing a sufficiently large area to be seen at once, on the map at www.openstreetmap.org, that OSM outsiders are most likely to consult first. (Use the humanitarian data model for health facilities to specify the type if possible.)

How to deal with data problems ?

Problems may include illegal lat/lon coordinates (i.e. 0.0/0.0), or lat/lon coordinates which are clearly off (i.e. a hospital to be located in Port-Au-Prince with lat/lon-coordinates around Jacmel) and duplicate entries.

How to deal with duplicate entries

There are a lot of duplicates in the PAHO/WHO list. Some of them are obvious, even to mappers who aren't familiar with the local situation in Haiti. Others are less obvious and must ultimately be resolved by experts at PAHO/WHO. If you identify duplicate entries

note=any note/hint for people who want to resolve the poential conflict

Add the OSM nodes or ways representing the duplicate health facilities with the role object to the relation.

See this example. It keeps two potentially duplicate facilities in Terreneuve together.

How to deal with other data problems ?

If you identify a problem add it to the object using the tag FIXME=*. We'll generate reports which collect the reported FIXME notes. This relieves you from the burden of submitting individual issues to the PAHO issue list.

Duplicates

This is a list of potential duplicate entries in the PAHO/WHO master list. They have been identified by OSM mappers during the initial import process.

Do not edit this list. It has been generated automatically from the OSM database. Potential duplicates are managed there as special relations, see this example.

The maintainers of the PAHO list are aware of the duplicates and they are working on eliminating them. Upcoming version of the PAHO master list should include less duplicates. OSM will remove duplicates from its database as soon as they are deleted in the PAHO list.

Get all PAHO Health Facilities in OSM

Get all hospitals in Haiti

Ultimately, all hospitals should be represented in the PAHO Health Facilities listings. However, to overcome any gaps or newly placed facilities not yet covered by the PAHO index, this query may be used.
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